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In our HQ we have a large upside-down racoon on the wall of a meeting room.
It’s one of 3 meeting rooms that have oversized emojis in vinyl on the wall opposite the video conferencing camera.
Each emoji relates to one of 3 behaviours we hold as important to Resulting's DNA.
The word behaviour is important here.
They’re not values.
They’re behaviours.
I picked up this nuance from Damian Hughes - co-presenter on the Podcast when he worked with our team a couple of years ago on high-performance culture.
“The problem with values...”
he said
“...is that you can’t evidence them. But you can evidence behaviours.”
Putting them on the wall (and naming the meeting rooms for them) means our staff can’t forget what they are. Putting them opposite the video conferencing camera means that our customers see them and ask what they mean.
Visible and visceral.
This was the reason I chose Resulting as our name originally too - when you have the word Results in your email address it’s pretty hard to forget what you’re meant to be doing for clients as a consultancy.
Anyway, the Racoon is our Curiosity icon.
If you type Curious into the emoji finder on MS Teams, you get a Racoon.
We don’t have Racoons in the UK so I have no idea if they’re curious or not, but if they label an emoji after them, there must be some correlation.
There are loads of ways to unpack curiosity.
Asking “Why?” is one way. It’s a failing of many people in business and life that they forget (or don’t have the courage) to ask “Why?”. You surface so much goodness, so much context, so much that matters when you ask “Why?” and then shut up and listen.
Curiosity is also about following unusual pathways. Poking around in the corner or in the dark rather than walking by. Turning over that stone, following that link, reading that article, listening to that podcast, chatting to that stranger. Sometimes we miss the most valuable things by failing to do that simple next step, we turn around in the clouds when the top of the mountain us just ahead of us, out of sight.
Being experienced culls curiosity. Self-defining yourself as an expert in your field, an SME or somebody who knows Best Practice. These labels are the buffers at the end of the curiosity railway line. Really smart people switch the points and go down sidings or switch onto different railway lines altogether.
Being a self-pronounced expert is a sign of arrogance.
Being curious is a sign of humility.
When you “know your stuff” or “have done this many times before” your capabilities fall into stasis. You stop finding newness because you already know all of the oldness.
This is Principle 3 of Deshoring: Continuous Learning over Static Capability.
I’m going to speak from the perspective of normal distribution here. There are outliers who don’t fall into the generalisations I’m about to make. But the big fat middle of the Gaussian curve falls into this definition.
Consultants are experts. They pride themselves on knowing. They promote Best Practice.
Average consultants represent the absolute worst for curiosity.
They get to a point of expertise and stop learning. Or, at the very best, decelerate their real learning to a kerb crawl because they know their stuff.
Great consultants ask “Why?”.
But they’re also continuously leaning. Turning those stones over. The really good ones go looking for new stones in different fields, streams and rock pools.
Sometimes, the life of a consultant means that you can’t easily learn.
I have talked to a few elite sports coaches about this and written about it previously: elite athletes train for 95% of their time and perform for 5% of their time. Consultants perform for 99% of their time and train for 2% or less.
Athletes are measured when they train (GPS, Gym, Nutrition) and when they perform (Scoreboard, Stats, GPS, fans cheering or booing). SAP Consultants have utilisation targets (not at Resulting IT I must add) and have some form of “deliverable tracker” that measures the flow of work, but not the quality of their advice.
Consultants are so busy being billable that they don’t get time to look at the next version of the software they’re implementing, so they revert to what they did last time. There’s no time for curiosity and, if you are one of the self-proclaimed “experts”, there’s no intrinsic motivation to be curious anyway.
Agentic AI Consultants like S4SensAI that enable Deshoring don’t suffer from Static Capability. They’re continuously trained with the latest materials on the latest releases of the software they specialise in. They’re force fed all of the latest stuff so that when you ask them for advice, you benefit from their continuous learning.
Try this. Find an SAP consultant, the best one you know, and ask them how they’d solve a problem in S/4HANA. Then call us and ask us to ask S4SensAI the exact same question.
One answer will be clipped back by the point at which the SAP consultant stopped learning.
The other will be comprehensive and completely up to date on the latest and greatest functionality and technical possibilities.
Next, ask him or her to solve a problem in an area they haven’t worked in, ask an MM consultant to solve a problem relating to Accounts Receivable. Then bring the same question to S4SensAI and watch it solve problems in every functional or technical area.
Agentic AI consultants don’t just continuously learn in their field, they continuously learn across all of the fields, all of the time.
So, do we no longer need SAP consultants because they don’t know anything?
Quite the opposite.
You really do still need SAP consultants.
You just need 50% of the ones you have today and you need to keep the really good ones, the thoroughbreds who ask “Why?” and build great business relationships. You need the critical thinkers and the problem solvers.
But you should start to put the donkeys out to grass and replace them with an Agentic SAP delivery model.
Today.
Deshoring: Faster, Cheaper, Better. SAP delivery.